The Devil's Dream (12 page)

For the next three years, Nonnie and Harry Sharp traveled all over Tennessee and Alabama in a wire-wheeled buggy, followed by Charley Stamper (Sambo), the singer Dennis O'Grady, and the Barnett Sisters in two wagons with DR. HARRY SHARP'S CELEBRATED MEDICINE SHOW, OR PHYSIC OPERA painted in gilt and red letters on the sides. Various musicians, dancers, and magicians traveled with them for a time along the way. They carried a hammer and a saw to build the platform in each town. Sometimes they were forced to sneak out of these towns before dawn, if business had been bad and they couldn't pay their bills.

Nonnie learned to testify movingly to the amazing curative powers of Dr. Harry Sharp's Celebrated Nervine, stating that she had been completely incapacitated by nervousness, prostrate between the bedsheets for three long years, until just four bottles of Nervine had restored her to herself.

Accompanied by Harry on guitar, she learned to sing “The House of the Rising Sun” in a soulful way, never connecting the words with her own downfall as she sang,
“It's been the ruin of many a poor girl, and God, I know I'm one
.
”
For this number, Nonnie wore a low-cut red velvet dress with black net stockings and gloves,
in order to create the proper illusion
, as Harry said. Nonnie learned fast that nearly everything about the medicine show was illusion, including the medicine itself, which Harry mixed up as needed. Once, in Knoxville, she watched as he made up an entirely new product before her very eyes, using flour and water to form a paste which he colored green somehow and rolled into hundreds of tiny pills. “These Vital Sparks pills, derived from an amazingly virile Oriental turtle, have proved to be a remarkable remedy for male weakness,” Harry announced. He said that they “rescued the Chinese from the threat of extinction when their manhood had lost the strength to perpetrate the race.” Nonnie, behind the curtain, giggled and giggled the first time she heard him pushing the Vital Sparks pills, but they were all gone in a week's time. There was a lot of male weakness out there. Soon, rolling up the Vital Sparks pills was a regular part of her job.

When she questioned Harry, ever so tactfully, about the ethics involved in selling his medications to the gullible public, he just laughed. “Honey,” he said, “since the public insists on being poisoned, we may as well give them a good time too.”

It was impossible for Nonnie to argue with Harry, since he could talk rings around her, or anybody. Nonnie couldn't get enough of his talking. Those first months, they'd sit up late into the night in a rented room in whatever town they were in, smoking cigarettes and drinking rye whiskey and talking, talking, talking. Nonnie never knew she had so much to say. She told him her whole life, which grew in the telling until she found herself going on and on about things she never knew she'd noticed. Talking to Harry, Nonnie became more and more interesting; Nonnie became her own story. Harry's story was more tragic and more complicated although it too involved his mother's early death . . . then his stepfather's terrible cruelty, Harry's running away, his life on the road, a job in a Baltimore whorehouse, an early stint in vaudeville, time spent on a riverboat, many passionate though unwise affairs of the heart, many misunderstandings and unfair accusations. . . . Harry talked on and on into all those hot southern nights. Nonnie didn't mention it when he contradicted himself. She didn't care if all of it was true or not, or if any of it was true. She had been starved for talking. Harry was
such
a talker! Why, it was plain to see that he could have done
anything
, been
anybody
—politician, actor, lawyer, president. And he knew the biggest words, and he never used just one of them when six would do.

They worked Chattanooga, Scottsboro, Huntsville, and Decatur, then headed down toward Birmingham through Hartselle and Cullman, for Nonnie had taken it into her head to see the ocean, and Harry had promised he'd take her to Mobile. But Dennis O'Grady's tuberculosis worsened in Birmingham and they had to leave him there, and Nonnie was not comfortable with the promises Harry made to Dennis when they left him in the hospital charity ward. He looked like a mouse lying in that bed, she thought, with such great big eyes. She knew she would never see him again. One of the Barnett Sisters was swept off her feet by a rich widowed store owner in Prattville and stayed there, so they took on a new girl, Dottie Ballou. She was a plump young thing with a big voice and a kind of sparkle and recklessness about her. Charley Stamper found her singing at a café in Montgomery, and she was happy to leave there—anxious, so she said, to see the world.

For some reason, just about the time Dottie Ballou joined the show, Nonnie suddenly began to think about Grassy Branch. She thought about Durwood's funny lopsided grin and Lizzie's rosy red cheeks, and a lot of silly little things—the way the mist clung to Cemetery Mountain in the mornings, the twining ivy pattern on the oilcloth that covered the old kitchen table. She could close her eyes and trace that ivy with her fingers, even in Mobile. When Harry drove her out to see the ocean, it was not much, finally, just a lot of water. “I don't know what the hell else you might have been expecting,” Harry said angrily. By then he was beginning to get short with her.

Nonnie was not really surprised when she came back to the hotel room early one afternoon and caught Harry in their bed with Dottie Ballou. Dottie Ballou's white thighs were real fat. “Excuse me!” Nonnie said, slamming the door. When she came back later, Dottie was gone, but nothing was ever the same again. Harry couldn't talk his way out of this one so fast, although he made a damn good stab at it, deriding monogamy as contrary to nature and stating that his inconsequential dalliance with Dottie Ballou was pathetic in its insignificance, and had only made him appreciate Nonnie all the more. Nonnie still loved the sound of his voice, but she listened with half a mind now, knowing—in that way she knew things—that another change was on the way. She hung out over the ironwork grille of their window in Mobile, smoking cigarettes, wearing a red Chinese silk robe with nothing on underneath, watching the bustling, brawling life in the street below, and wondered when it would happen, and what it would be. The night the hotel burned, Harry wasn't even with her. Nonnie woke up with the sheets on fire. The last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was the wide blank gaze of Ezekiel's blue-blue eyes as he led the high cold singing in the church at Chicken Rise. “Oh God,” Nonnie said. “Oh God,” for she really had loved him. Then her mouth was full of dirt and she was dead.

When Mamma run off with the medicine show, I was working days at that lumber camp out from Holly Grove, old man Beady Nolan's outfit, and fiddling someplace nearabout every night. I could fiddle all night and work all day and never think a thing of it. I was wild as any young buck, but I never let on to it when I'd go back over there on Grassy Branch and see the folks. Why, I'd go right along to meeting with the rest of em, and sit in a row on them old hard benches, and sing them old high hymnsongs. What Daddy and Mamma don't know don't hurt em, I figured then, for Daddy didn't hold with fiddle music nor with dancing, and I didn't have no intention of running up again him iffen I didn't have to.

Nor Mamma neither, for I helt Mamma up in my mind as a flat-out angel in them days, her always so nice and sweet and pretty and all, not a thing like them other old women around here. Why, you could of knocked me over with a feather when she run off.

Durwood was the one told me. He come over to the camp a-purpose to do so, and then me and him got good and drunk, and I laid out of work the next day while Durwood went on back home. Somehow I couldn't go over there just yet, I couldn't look Daddy in the face, and I had to play for a dance in town that night anyhow.

I reckon I had been drinking some when I got there. I was bad to drink back then. Well, they was this purty little redheaded gal that caught my eye. She was dancing up a storm. And I could tell that she was cottoning up to me, making eyes and such, so when me and the boys took a break, I says to her, “Let's you and me take us a little walk, honey,” and we done so.

We walked off from the hall a little ways, and we was just commencing to get acquainted good when I felt of somebody a-grabbing me around the neck, liked to choke me. “What the hell air ye a-doing?” I heerd and hit turned out to be this great big old boy that was that little redheaded gal's regular feller. Right then I knowed I wasn't going to fight him, for he would of made two of me.

“Now Lonnie, now Lonnie,” she was a-crying. Her name was Shirley Hash. “He didn't know no better,” she said to Lonnie, and I'll give her credit for it, so then he let go of me and grabbed
her
, twisting her pore little arm up behind her back.

I was not too drunk to say I thought he ought to turn loose of her.

“I reckon you do,” he said, “and just who the hell might you be, anyhow, over here a-rubbing on my girl?”

So I said who I was, and then Lord if he didn't start up laughing. “Oh, so you are that Melungeon feller,” he said. “I reckon I know about you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I axed him, and then he liked to bust a gut laughing. They was some several fellers gathered up about us by now, a-listening to all of this.

“Shirley, this here is a woods colt that don't even know it,” he says, and at least he lets go of her arm. “My grandma was Missus Rice that used to run the boardinghouse in Cana, the one that stood where the lumberyard is now,” he goes on to say, “and she tole it for a fact that yer mamma done tuck up with a Melungeon man that was staying up there in her boardinghouse, and yer mamma tried to run off with him too, but he wouldn't have her, and then she had his baby. Hell, it weren't no big secret at the time. Everybody around there knowed it.”

“Liar,” I hollered, and I lit into him, and he liked to change my looks afore they pulled him offen me.

Well, it seemed like I couldn't work no more after that, or do nothing afore I got to the bottom of it. We was paid two days prior to this dance I am telling you about, so what I done, I just tuck my pay and lit off from there, and the firstest one I went to see was Tom Kincaid that taught me to play the fiddle, and knowed me since I was a boy. He was some kind of a cousin of Daddy's. He run the dry goods store in Cana.

I reckon I looked pretty rough when I come in there, for Tom jest laid down this roll of oilcloth he was a-measuring, and said, “R.C., let's me and you go in the back here and eat us some lunch,” and he tuck my elbow and brung me back there, where he doctored up my face some and give me some hoop cheese and crackers to eat and got us some sweet milk to drink, and said, “Son, it's a mighty hard thing, I'll grant ye,” for he thought I was all in a swivet over Mamma running off with the show.

Then I told Tom what all that old boy had said about Mamma and the Melungeon, and his thin face got kind of a cagey look.

“Well, is it true or not?” I axed him pint-blank, but he jest shook his head. He tuck off his glasses and polished em and then he put em back on. He had these little bitty gold glasses.

“I heard something oncet to that effect,” he allowed finely. “But if you live long enough, you are likely to hear anything oncet.”

“I reckon I could jest an Daddy,” I said, but Tom said he didn't believe I ought to do that, that Daddy had moren plenty to bear and there wasn't no reason for me to ax him nothing about that Melungeon. Tom said this real forceful.

“So you are telling me hit's the truth,” I said, for even if I was a fool, I wasn't a tee-total fool.

“I am not telling you nothing,” Tom Kincaid said. “I am not telling you but what's the God's truth, you had best fergit this whole business, and get on back home and help yer pa,” he said.

“I can't do that, Tom,” I said. “I am bound to go around here axing some more folks, I reckon, iffen you won't tell me.”

“You will do nothing of the kind,” Tom said. He was getting all riled up. “Listen here, boy. Hit is best to leave well enough alone. Hit is best to keep yer goddamn mouth shut, if you foller me.”

“Well, I don't foller you,” I said. I stood up, I was fixing to go.

Tom kept pacing back and forth in his little office there, with the door shut. “All right,” he said. “All right, Goddamnit. I tell you what. If you are bound and determined to ax somebody, go up there on Cherokee Mountain and ax old Willie. Tell him I sent you up that to ax him.”